It’s the last day of November, and I just put Christmas up.

Happenings

  • Managed to get my data in after a week of heavy marking and being behind on my planning. At the moment one of my biggest challenges is proportional/multiplicative reasoning with my weaker year 9 group. Weaker students really struggle to make the jump from thinking additively to thinking multiplicatively, and struggle to conceive of multiplication as anything other than repeated addition.
  • Christmas light switch-on in my town last week. Being a town of only around 5000-6000 people we are lucky to have lights and a switch-on event.
  • Put Christmas up in my home today. Having a one-year-old has meant no baubles below a metre, so our tree rather looks like it has no trousers on.

Advent digital detox

Next week I’ll attempt a digital detox. Suffice to say it’s the usual motivations — regain control of attention, have more time for other worthwhile things, and set a good example to my kids. I’m making a note here so that I can set myself some rules in writing and hold myself accountable to them.

I am not aiming to cut out all technology. The main thing is the smartphone. I don’t intend to cut down on time spent on my laptop at all really — if I’m on my laptop, I’m usually doing something I consider worthwhile. But it’s the trickle of phone use through the day, the itch to fill every moment with content and/or communications), that’s what needs to change.

Anyway, I’m saying goodbye to as many distracting apps as I reasonably can. Mastodon can go. The web browser is an issue as I use it to watch YouTube (ad blocker and playing while minimized — who needs YouTube Premium?), so I can’t “get rid” of YouTube without installing some kind of content blocker on my browser. For messaging, I’ve requested that close friends and family send non-urgent messages via email rather than WhatsApp. Group chats remain an issue but I’ll just set the Buzzkill app to send me fewer notifications (if you are on Android and don’t have Buzzkill, it’s fantastic — fine-grained control over notifications based on filters and rules, and 0 data collection). For RSS, I’ll go on briefly, and send any interesting-looking articles to my eReader via Wallabag. Or I’ll just browse from the computer, not mobile.

Links

  • Is my blue your blue?. My wife and I are forever disagreeing over whether objects in our lives are blue or green. Then she linked me this, and thus we have (semi-)scientifically determined exactly where each other’s cutoff points are for blue and green. Colour classification is essentially arbitrary and unscientific — I tooted earlier this week to complain about my kid having learn what “indigo” is thanks to Newton’s weird obsession with the number 7.
  • How To Quit Spotify. Owning your own music is cool, but there are obvious conveniences to streaming as well, and in a streaming-heavy household I don’t know how feasible it would be to stop. But as this article illuminates, leaving Spotify for a more ethical (and higher-quality!) streaming service is actually really easy — thanks to good old adversarial interoperability, you can easily port your stuff over. I’ve started a free trial and have all my playlists back already.
  • Fifteen Years. For any long-time readers of xkcd, this made you emotional, right?